Social Media are not essential facilities. Those who claim that Facebook is a "social utility" or "social commons" must admit that such sites are not essential to survival, economic success, or online life. Unlike water and electricity, life can go on without social networking services.

Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade. The gamers achieved their discovery by playing Foldit, an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules.

"In this post, I will argue that cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing, and that the only thing keeping this from happening is the absence of a "killer app"."

This reminded me of Cole Camplese's comments on the instant crowdsourcing of video recording the sessions at the 2011 TLT Symposium, Clay Shirky's example of that socially-written mathematics (?) paper, and a bit of Chris Long's posts on using digital tools in research.

Shades of the Shirky Symposium Keynote? At first glance this might seem frightening to the layman, but think about it: knowledgeable, trained doctors using an additional but social source to find information that augments peer reviewed journals.

As more books and journals become easily accessible online, it’s easy to wonder if brick-and-mortar libraries could go the way of the video store. But research at the university has shown that the more people look to digital resources, the more they consult physical materials as well, according to Judith Nadler, director of the University of Chicago Library.

Individuals acting as independent agents, without hierarchy, form orders without design, and how network computer technologies facilitate this in society.

This is Part 1, Just shown tonight on the BBC in England, but copyright laws what they are, the links to LiveLeak in this Reddit post will probably be taken down soon. But there are always other means.

“Students are totally shameless about how they use their computers in class,’’ said David Jones, an MIT professor. “I fantasize about having a Wi-Fi jammer in my lecture halls to block access to distractions.’’

While MIT has yet to unwire a single lecture hall, some law schools, including the University of Chicago’s, have in recent years blocked wireless access in classrooms to keep students engaged in Socratic discussions instead of their classmates’ Groupon and eBay activitie